Unprecedented Cyclone Chapala Bears Down on Yemen

Chapala, now the unprecedented 23rd category 4 or category 5 tropical cyclone to form during 2015, is bearing down on the nation of Yemen. A nation that is likely to experience hurricane force winds and may receive as much as 8 years worth of rainfall from Chapala’s intense spiral bands over a 24-48 hour period.

Chapala is expected to track west-by-northwest, weakening to a category 1 or 2 storm just before making landfall in Yemen on Monday. At that point the storm is predicted to dump as much as 12 to 16 inches of rain over parts of Yemen. If this happens as current weather models predict, parts of Yemen which typically receive less than 2 inches of rain per year may see as much as 8 years or more worth of rain fall over the course of a day or two.

(Chapala’s predicted path and intensity brings an unprecedented rain-maker to Yemen. One that is capable of delivering as much as 8 years worth of rainfall in 1-2 days. Image source: Joint Typhoon Warning Center.)

Large, powerful storms of this kind do not typically track into Yemen. And the predicted and possible rainfall amounts would almost certainly shatter all-time records for the arid state. A potential event that Dr. Jeff Masters over at WeatherUnderground yesterday called unprecedented. Such heavy rains would hit a region that is not at all equipped for dealing with so much water falling from the skies. Dry lands that form a hard baked surface will tend to enhance pooling and run-off. Regions that typically see extreme flooding from just 1 or 2 inches of rainfall could see 5 to 10 times as much. Needless to say, this is a developing and dangerous situation that bears careful monitoring.

Conditions in Context — Powerful Hurricanes in a Hothouse World

2015 will close out as the hottest year in the 135 year climate record. It will hit temperatures, globally, about 1.1 to 1.2 C hotter than 1880s averages. This extreme temperature departure, is nearly 1/3 of the difference between 1880 and the last ice age — but on the side of hot. An extreme heating that is starting to force the glaciers of the world to rapidly melt, the seas to rapidly rise, the oceans to rapidly decline in health, and climates around the world to rapidly destabilize.

The oceans of the world draw in more than 90 percent of this excess heat energy. The added energy at the ocean surface, in its turn, provides more fuel for the most intense category 4 and category 5 tropical cyclones. These storms draw their energy directly from heat and moisture at the ocean surface. So as we, through our burning of fossil fuels and emitting of greenhouse gasses which in turn warms the climate, are unwittingly both increasing the frequency of strong storms as well as adding to their maximum potential energy.

During recent years, we have seen greater and greater numbers of the most intense versions of these storms globally. During 2004 a new record number for category 4 and 5 cyclones was breached, only to be supplanted this year with the formation, so far, of 23 of these monster cyclones. In addition, the number of records for most intense storms for regions seems to be falling at an increasing rate. In 2013, cyclone Haiyan, roared into the record books as one of the most intense storms the world had ever seen. And this year we have two basin records — Patricia (Western Hemisphere) and Chapala (strongest to form so far south in the Indian Ocean).

The human hothouse, thus appears to be providing more storms of high intensity. And with more warming in store — with nations, corporations, and politicians continuing to fight to delay climate action, ever more dangerous storms are coming.

LJR

“May you live in interesting times” is an English expression purported to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. Despite being so common in English as to be known as “the Chinese curse”, the saying is apocryphal, and no actual Chinese source has ever been produced.

– Thanks, RS and CB,
This is timely news.
Climate related ‘weather deformities’ around the globe.
I’m sure more will follow.

– An ‘armchair editor’ request re:
“Like Patricia, this storm gathered strength in waters that were much hotter than normal (+1 to +2 C above average for the region).”
It may add color, import and depth to the data above if actual values of water temps were added.
Plus some F values alongside the C. Your work is often shared with C illiterate readers. Most of whom would benefit greatly.
Not a big deal but every little bit helps…🙂
OUT

– A wealth enabled pre-migration purchase?
– This is one I noted from Santa Barbara, CA 2012. It’s a large tract of shoreline and bluff.

‘More Mesa Sold to Saudi’

With Conservation-Development Deal in Limbo, Owner Sells Six Legal Parcels for $25 Million

The 265 privately owned acres that compose the bulk of More Mesa ​— ​a coastal bluff-top open space between Goleta and Santa Barbara popular with hikers, bikers, gliders, beachgoers, and nature lovers ​— ​have been sold for $25 million, according to the County Assessor’s Office.

Ps Many language schools in US have large enrollments of Saudi students learning ‘American’ english.
There’s likely an investigative piece here for someone. I have a full slate and much behind.
Real estate and language instruction could be keys to future ‘migrations.’
OUT

In 2012, I noticed an influx of Arab students at a ‘Chapala St.’ language school in Santa Barbara. All seemed to be well off.
Black soot on white walls got me interested.
PHOTO: Soot fallout has collected on these corner outcroppings. The language school logo is on the wall to the right. It is on a street named Chapala.
The succulent looking burnt to a crisp is to the left.

Colorado Bob

From Dr. Master’s latest –
Chapala’s southward track will make it only the second tropical cyclone recorded near the mouth of the Gulf of Aden, which is crossed by roughly 400 ships a week. The adjustment in Chapala’s track could have major implications for Yemen, as it brings the center closer to the 980-year-old settlement of Al Mukalla (also known as Mukalla), a busy port and Yemen’s fifth-largest city (population around 300,000). If Chapala were to pass just south of Al Mukalla, the sharp angle of approach to the coast would accentuate any storm surge. Yemen has been in the grip of a civil war since March, so any landfall near this populated area could intersect with the conflict in hard-to-predict ways. According to an October 30 article from Reuters, ten of Yemen’s 22 governorates were assessed as being in an emergency food situation in June, one step below famine on a five-point scale. The assessment has not been updated since then, partly because experts have not managed to get sufficient access to survey the situation. About a third of the country’s population, or 7.6 million people urgently require food aid, the The U.N. World Food Programme said (thanks go to wunderground member barbamz for alerting us to this article.)

As it moves ashore, Chapala will slam into steep mountains near the coast,

Kevin Jones

The Day is Coming when most people, even lied to Americans, will figure this thing out. Look out Ministers of Propaganda. The planet will continue to break records like a broken record. And a tune will begin playing in peoples heads, broken record style: Indict the Bastards, Indict the Bastards, Indict the Bastards….

Wharf Rat

Damage from Patricia, the strongest hurricane ever measured in the Western Hemisphere, may cost the U.S. billions from floods, even after the storm spared the largest cities in Mexico.

Flooding in Texas may lead to more than $3 billion in losses, though it’s too early to project the extent of damages, according to Chuck Watson, director of research and development at Kinetic Analysis Corp. Losses in Mexico are likely to be less than $2 billion, he said.

My 5 billion number includes combined estimated losses from damages in both Texas and Mexico.

As for total cyclone number, it doesn’t seem that’s fully resolved at this time. The expectation is that the strongest storms grow in strength and that there is a tendency for storms that do form to hit overall higher intensities.

Bill H

Ryan in New England

In recent years we’ve been having to use superlatives so often to describe weather/climate events that they are beginning to lose the impact and effect that those adjectives are intended to have. The public develops a perception that scientists, meteorologists or newscasters are loosely and inaccurately using these words and just claiming biggest, strongest and unprecedented for dramatic effect. An example is a caller I heard on NPR not long ago in reference to last year being the hottest on record. The caller brushed of the news by saying that to him, it seems like every year “they” say it was the hottest year every. Apparently without any clue that that is one very clear result of anthropogenic global warming! The point is, the more dire and unprecedented the events become, the more the ignorant masses simply ignore the entire situation.

Griffin

Great point. I believe that this is a form of shifting baselines. “That happens all the time” can be used to imply normality, even if the event is anything but. Ignorance is a daunting foe to progress.

Greg

Nicely timed. Thank you Robert. Of course the water and wind are just delivery vehicles for energy and the excess energy we are enabling into our ocean atmospheric system are tremendous and described in terms of hundreds of thousands of hiroshima bombs worth per day. Texas felt some of that again last night. Rooftop rescues and very high rainfall rates.http://www.weather.com/storms/severe/news/severe-weather-impacts-southern-plains-texas

Exceptional things like Chapala should make climate denial a thing of the past. But we still have a long way to go. There are signs that even the Republicans are starting to be divided on this issue. Comparing the demise of climate denial with climate it self is quite interesting, it gradually increases almost unnoticeable. When certain tipping points are reached things start to accelerate resulting even in abrupt climate denial demise.

Colorado Bob

“We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on Oct. 30 in the Journal of Glaciology. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica – there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.” Zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.” …………………………………… But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years — I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.” ………………………………. Zwally said that while other scientists have assumed that the gains in elevation seen in East Antarctica are due to recent increases in snow accumulation, his team used meteorological data beginning in 1979 to show that the snowfall in East Antarctica actually decreased by 11 billion tons per year during both the ERS and ICESat periods. They also used information on snow accumulation for tens of thousands of years, derived by other scientists from ice cores, to conclude that East Antarctica has been thickening for a very long time.

“At the end of the last Ice Age, the air became warmer and carried more moisture across the continent, doubling the amount of snow dropped on the ice sheet,” Zwally said.

wili

If this is true, that means we’re _really_ going to see some major increases in slr rates once the Antarctic starts kicking in. But for now, does this mean we are not likely to see the doubling every five years or so that Hansen posited as a possibility, iirc.

Colorado Bob

Nope. their findings are at top of the ice pile, remember it’s as large as America. What our problem is, everything that is melting is at the coast. The ice they found is not going to change sea level rise. Because much older ice is qued up to melt long before this snow ever reaches the coast. If anything it will add more weight at the of the pile.

The most interesting comment is that , snowfall is increasing because the world is warming. That means means it’s getting warmer.

One of the great denier ideas is that snow is sign of “cold”. It is not, I have lived at over -50 F for over a week . There is zero water vapor at this temperature. It is driest

Abel Adamski

Actually worth noting that Antarctica in the geological record has tracked a couple of centuries at least behind the Arctic, postulated to be the ocean transfer of heat . However we have been heating at a far faster rate with higher GHG’s so all bets off

Abel Adamski

I find this study very interesting for a number or reasons, the main one is that it is based on radar altimetry , i.e the height. They are assuming mass based on height.
Greenland and I assume also Antarctica use GPS stations to measure the rebound from ice loss which is appreciable, affects altitude and thus the entire premise.
Does not factor the melt underneath or the internal lakes and moulins which at times empty in a huge voluminous rush.
As they state creates a mystery as to why slr, and the massive cold surface meltwater in the Atlantic and Southern oceans. Maybe they are just making erroneous assumptions based on partial information.
The Grace satellites tell a different story and they do measure MASS

Kevin Jones

The Zwally figures always seemed to be a bit overly optimistic when it comes to ice mass. One wonders if they aren’t double counting water invading under the ice sheet perimeter from the oceans as ice mass?

Mblanc

“The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”

So he is saying that overall discharge rates are unchanged globally. That implies some other source/s has/have ramped up significantly faster than we thought.

If that is an extra 0.5mm from Greenland, for example, I would think the net result of this study is pretty negative, because we only need one ice sheet to start collapsing rapidly to have dramatic effects.

wili

“There is no quality data to support the claims made by the authors of [ice] growth in East Antarctica,” said Eric Rignot, principle scientist for the Radar Science and Engineering Section at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Wharf Rat

“wasn’t data from the past six years”.
In the comments, somebody pointed out ESA has data for those years.

CryoSat detects heavy Antarctic ice loss
May 22, 2015 The ESA CryoSat mission has detected significant ice loss in a usually stable Antarctic region. The data recorded by the satellite revealed how multiple glaciers along the Southern Antarctic Peninsula started shedding ice in the 2009, with no prior warning.

The findings were made by researchers from the University of Bristol in the UK. While studying the data captured by the ESA’s ice mission, the team found that the glaciers have been losing ice at a rate of around 60 cubic km (14.4 cubic miles) per year. That makes them one of the largest contributors to sea level rise in Antarctica, depositing some 300 cubic km (72 cubic miles) of water into the ocean over the last six years.

Prior to 2009, the 750 km (466 mile)-long peninsula had shown no signs of change. It’s thought that the ongoing warming of surrounding oceans is to blame for the sudden ice loss, as changes in air temperature or snowfall are not significant enough to account for the shift.

Syd Bridges

Thanks for keeping us up-to-date on this, like all your other posts, Robert.

I worry that this might be much more devastating than it would be in other parts of the world, due to a total lack of preparedness in Yemen. I do not blame the Yemenis: why prepare for something that has never happened before? I think few countries are really prepared for what global warming is going to bring us.

While reading this article, I was reminded of a conversation I had with an English ex-pat, who had worked in Oman for several years. He moved into a new one story house, which had air con and electric light. All went well for three years, until one night they had a rainstorm. It was then that he found out that all the lights had been installed by running wires across the flat roof and simply drilling holes in that roof, where the light would hang from the ceiling. He found himself in the dark, with an interesting combination of water and live wires coming from above. It was the first rain on that house.

A similar thing happened to my parents soon after they moved to Kenya in 1951. Their new, Government provided house had louver windows facing east. The architect, who had worked in Mumbai for many years, failed to realize that the East African monsoon does not come from the same direction as the Indian monsoon, with the result that after they had been in the house less than a week, with me and my twin brother being six months old at the time, the house was flooded out unexpectedly when the first rains arrived.

With the rapid changes, it won’t just be places like Yemen that are unprepared. Sea defenses, drainage schemes, flood prevention and wind proofing of infrastructure will all be overwhelmed by the storms to come. And the politicians, who preferred tax cuts and FF bribes to action, will bluster that “no one could have foreseen such a storm, or prepared for it even if they had.” What they won’t say is that such storms need never have happened in the first place, if the plethora of warnings had been heeded and the scientists listened to, rather than choosing to believe manufactured “anti-knowledge” as a basis for policy.

Good points, Syd. Add these kinds of construction issues to how population centers are situated on the coast — low lying with hard baked and very steep mountains at their backs — and we begin to get an idea of what such a severe rainfall event could mean for this region.

Mblanc

Excellent examples Syd. Many places in the world have buildings that are just good enough for current climactic conditions, and that has been appropriate, because it is wasteful to build anything else.

But if the climate ‘regime’ changes, the underlying assumptions on which those buildings are built, become outdated.

Anyone want to price up replacing every bit of guttering and drainage pipework in a nation?

That is a systematic problem on a worldwide scale, and it is the poorest areas that will suffer most.

Colorado Bob

Quoting 185. BaltimoreBrian:
What a preposterous idea, not worth contradicting ;)ColoradoBob I don’t know much about the pine beetles advancing their ranges as the climate warms. It will be sad if they kill off the oldest known living tree. I’ll defer to your expertise🙂

Climate Change is killing the Joshua Trees below them in the driest place in America.

Climate Change Threatens an Iconic Desert Tree

The Desert Southwest and the Arctic are being ripped apart by climate change faster than anywhere else because they are North America’s most extreme ecosystems.

– Can there really be any surprise there.
Herr Putin is is a motorcycle loving gangster whose prize possession is a National Football League Super Bowl ring.
That is his value system in a nutshell.
The same applies to many Americans of course.
They’re ruthless, as we have seen.
– Every ‘tailgate’ party is really a ‘tailpipe’ party. The deviously turn their engines off though.
– So much for morality among ‘men’. But real ‘men’ are moral.
– V P has a lot of power, but he’s no more ruthless than the current Republican majority.
OUT

And they also believe in free markets. There is nothing conservative about the GOP or about Putin & Co., except when it comes to people’s sex lives; then, they’re “socially ‘conservative'”, i.e., control freaks.

Abel Adamski

RS
From the Daily Caller article. Linkages are more extensive than apparent.

“Putin’s comments likely came after his staff “did very, very extensive work trying to understand all sides of the climate debate,” according to Andrey Illarionov, Putin’s former senior economic adviser, who’s now a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.”

Wow, now that is totally bizarre–the Daily Caller, a rabid right-wing outlet, in league with the Kremlin. Who would have thought it possible? Almost as weird as the Kochs’ father spending time in the USSR. Hey, what if the Kochs are actually sleeper agents, trying to bring down capitalism by encouraging its excesses?

Ryan in New England

Putin and his staff and the Cato Institute are strange bedfellows indeed. Especially considering that until as recently as the late eighties Russia was the backbone of the “evil empire” that conservatives used to scare Americans. Now they are so rabid towards sane thinking policy makers they have put their differences aside. The enemy of your enemy is your friend.

Abel Adamski

When it comes to climate change, the world has reached a point of no return. That may sound ominous, but it is precisely where we need to be: unable to continue retreading old ground, we must resolutely set our future path.

Colorado Bob

Good night all –
Just remember the smallest things have huge jump on us. The bacteria, the viruses. the fungi. the simplest things on this Earth own it lock stock and barrel. We serve at their pleasure. And they don’t care.

Doug

I don’t remember if the following piece was posted on Robert’s site, but I found it better than anything I’ve read yet, that expresses the urgency of how quickly we need to change. Highly recommended reading, and worth passing around.

Jeremy

From your linked article Doug:
“…I suddenly felt guilty bringing this up, and desperately tried not to think that one day those happy children will despise us for leaving them a ransacked planet whipsawed by a chaotic climate.”

As I have posted here before – our children are going to hate this generation😦

wili

I was just thinking about this article yesterday. It really needs to be plastered everywhere continuously. And keep in mind that he is using rather conventional modeling to come up with this conclusion, iirc, and we all know that those are rather wildly conservative.

dnem

One of the most dramatic manifestations of this phenomenon is port infrastructure. I live in Baltimore and the powers that be here seem to have no inclination whatsoever that investing billions in an ever deeper port to accept ever larger ships might not be the best way to view the future. This idea is writ even larger in the Panama canal expansion and the, god help us, Lake Nicaragua canal. Really?! Decades and decades of huge ships crisscrossing the globe sending meaningless crap back and forth will be required to ever amortize these investments. The only ways to explain this behavior is either utter delusion that it might actually work or criminal callousness to make a buck off the building of this infrastructure now knowing that the model upon which it is built is doomed. I don’t now which is worse.

Jeremy in Wales

Was in Aberystwyth today meeting up with my son as it is his 21st, beautiful sunny day and very warm. Got back home and the BBC is reporting it as the UKs hottest November day, 22.4C (72.3F). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34693529 (Foggy everywhere else though).

With a little effort you can get things to the attention of the “difference makers”. I think that is a far more effective strategy, than just passing things along among friends and like- minded individuals.

I sent the article to two influential people at PNM which is the utility here in New Mexico, and asked if they could get it to the C.E.O.

I think if we got a bit more active, that would be more useful than just checking in with the latest global warming articles, when we already know what to do, to fix the problem.

Via the NWS I find that PDX, for October 2015, had average daily temperatures 5.2 degrees F (2.8 C) above normal.
Not a good sign. And above the 2 C mark.
Some parts of the PNW are getting some cool temps, and rain or snow with some flooding.
In a week though temps are expected to go back up and be a bit dry.
For now, no lasting snow or snow pack is likely.

The info is no longer available like it used to be because of 9/11, the “gift” that keeps on “giving.” Apparently the monitoring data on the refineries’ flood protection / petroleum release containment embankments are not available because of terrorists who would “get ideas” to blow up the weak points.

Plus, we have Jindal, who (if not someone before whether R or D) probably let the petrochemical companies monitor themselves.

Doug

I just got confirmation from a “higher up” in PNM that my e-mail will go to the CEO. Now my guess is that this CEO lives in a bit of an information bubble which is very common among the rich and powerful. So, with just a little bit of effort on my part, the CEO of the largest utility in New Mexico, will hopefully read this article from The Leap, that is among the most effective climate articles I’ve ever read.

PNM wants to keep two of their four coal fired plants open, and this CEO has been on television making the case for that. Now, maybe, perhaps, she’ll rethink that decision. Again, it doesn’t take that much effort in the Information Age to reach influential people. I think we should all try this approach.

Karhu

Fantastic job, Doug. A level of unique moral action that sets a strong example for us all. And why shouldn’t we lobby decision makers who have the ability to halt operations at plants that produce the most carbon? I sincerely hope this works out.

Spike

It’s a great idea – the one thing that will occasionally turn dogmatists and ideologues around is pointing out to them that their investments may lose out. One of the reasons I always push the carbon bubble idea on general fora. These people may not give a damn about ecosystems or human deaths, but mention £/$ loss and they start to listen.

“Wildlife doesn’t (know) which season it is”, one day it’s summer, next day it’s fall, next day starts out as spring but ends in winter…!
The same for the trees, flowers, and the birds and insects.
They are being squeezed with an ever tightening climate vise of our invention.
It’s ugly.
It’s tragic.
It’s our fault.
It’s sad.
OUT

Colorado Bob

In other news, NOAA’s El Niño report shows Niño 3.4 at 2.7 C positive anomaly. This ties the 1997 record for hottest weekly measure… Hottest monthly measure was 2.6. My prelim grid analysis for today is at +3 C daily in Nino 3.4. Yesterday’s was +2.9 C. My bootstrap tends to run about 0.1 C hotter than NOAA’s weekly in the average.

It’s worth noting that some models show a peak during the next few weeks. Others push the peak out to late November or early December. So we may have peaked this past week but the timing of the recent WWB/Kelvin Wave cycle hints that weekly maximums may continue to heighten into November.

Torrents of water in places that can’t deal with it. Meanwhile, the old system, snowfall and glacial runoff, by which nature has gently watered croplands around the world, is being disrupted. “Let it Snow” is an essay I just wrote about that, in dread of another bare winter here in the Pacific Northwest: http://blog.edsuom.com/2015/10/let-it-snow.html

rayduray

Thanks for providing the link. I very much appreciated your Halloween blog item. We share a number of concerns. As a resident of a ski resort, (Mt. Bachelor/Bend, OR) I fully endorse your call for great snows in the PNW this winter. Of course I’m sober enough to have read the NWS projections with El Nino’s contribution over the next few months. So, I’ll settle for any snow at all that we can get.🙂

LAM78

Cheers, LAM. Chapala, according to reports from Weather Underground and the Weather Channel, was the strongest storm to form so far south in the Indian Ocean in the climate record. A basin record, though not as decisive as Patricia which was an all time Hemisphere record for Western Hemisphere storms.

Wharf Rat

…That makes October by far the highest monthly anomaly in the record; in fact, it beats the previous record (Jan 2007) by 0.15°C.
Relative to the 1951-80 base of GISS, October would be 1.18°C, and on the NOAA 20th Cen base, it would be 1.14°C. I wouldn’t expect to see those indices rise so high, because they have been somewhat lagging the NCEP/NCAR index recently. In September, GISS was only 0.81°C. Still, there is clearly a possibility of GISS reaching 1°C, and a very strong probability of being the highest anomaly ever, in all indices.

Thanks for this update, Wharf. Looks like we may be heading for +1.2 to +1.3 C vs 1880 in GISS, then. Big jump is getting baked in. And we probably have 2-5 more months for this spike to play out fully.

Most people probably only read the headline and failed to dig a tad deeper,

“If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years.”

Aldous

Another important consideration left out of discussion (at least on social media).

“At the end of the last Ice Age, the air became warmer and carried more moisture across the continent, doubling the amount of snow dropped on the ice sheet,” Zwally said.

The extra snowfall that began 10,000 years ago has been slowly accumulating on the ice sheet and compacting into solid ice over millennia, thickening the ice in East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica by an average of 0.7 inches (1.7 centimeters) per year. This small thickening, sustained over thousands of years and spread over the vast expanse of these sectors of Antarctica, corresponds to a very large gain of ice – enough to outweigh the losses from fast-flowing glaciers in other parts of the continent and reduce global sea level rise.”

Added rates of precipitation do serve to somewhat moderate SLR and probably helped to govern the very slow variations of Sea level during the Holocene. But if the notion is that under a regime of 400 ppm CO2 and 485 ppm CO2e that snowfall will beat out the geological record evidence pointing toward between 25 and 75+ feet of additional sea level rise in the pipe already or what basically amounts to most of Antarctica eventually going down at between 550 and 600 ppm CO2e, then I’d say my bets are against any such assessments.

Of course we have added snowfall. And that was expected. But the physical forces of glacial destabilization now in effect are already starting to overwhelm the integrity of the Antarctic ice sheets. Even more concerning is that other studies contradict Zwally’s figures — showing net losses now even as we have increasing evidence of margin destabilization, basal melt and flooding beyond grounding lines, and increasing rates of seaward motion of an ever larger number of glaciers.

The problem with Zwally’s technique — it uses volume, not mass. And volume, as we know, does not see what’s going on at the base of the ice sheet, which we know from Rignot and others is flooding with water in key regions.

From a report from April of this year:

“The researchers “weighed” Antarctica’s ice sheet using gravitational satellite data and found that from 2003 to 2014, the ice sheet lost 92 billion tons of ice per year, the researchers report in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. If stacked on the island of Manhattan, that amount of ice would be more than a mile high — more than five times the height of the Empire State Building.”

It’s not just a question of ‘at this time.’ It’s a question of Zwally using a less refined data set. In other words, if you have snow adding volume to the top of the ice sheet, but the snow is less dense than the compacted, high mass, ice that’s melting away at the bottom, then you can have a net mass loss even though the volume measure provides the illusion of a gain. The GRACE measures show such a discrepancy explicitly.

At least partly the headline writer’s fault, although deniers will latch onto anything to mislead–would have been easy enough to add “currently,” “at moment,” or some such just to make it a bit harder.

Colorado Bob

Another crazy Mideast event –Chapala Closing in on Yemen; Record November Warmth in Florida, Europe

It is difficult to overstate the rarity and gravity of this event: a hurricane-strength storm striking near a large, ancient city, situated near mountains, with no modern experience in dealing with tropical cyclones. Although Hurricane Patricia got much more media attention, Chapala may end up bringing more damage and misery by far. The ongoing civil war in Yemen can only exacerbate the suffering of those affected and complicate relief efforts. “The humanitarian situation in Yemen is deteriorating rapidly,” reported the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in an October 15 update. We can only hope that the powers that be respond to this threat in line with its seriousness.

Colorado Bob

PlazaRed

190+ litres of rain per sq meter, or about 9 inches in the Valencia, Spain region today with winds of about 120 KPH.
A large amount of beach damage and localised flooding.
Worst storm since 1995 according to the Spanish National news for this kind of damage.

R

I see the latest NOAA ENSO update has pacific sea temperatures resuming their upward spiral over the last week, with the “Nino3.4” region (east-central equatorial pacific) at 2.7C above normal.
If I remember correctly 1997/98 reached 2.6C and we are now basically in record territory?

Colorado Bob

The cyclone’s surge would tend to funnel up the narrow Gulf in the region and be amplified by the comparably narrow bay. It’s possible that this is a result of storm driven waters hitting that narrow opening.

Colorado Bob

Colorado Bob

Colorado Bob

I have had this idea for a few years , that the Fall will replace the Spring as most violent season. Mainly because the oceans are really exporting more heat than we have ever seen before. And the lows of Fall are enough to trigger massive rain events , just because there’s so much heat in the system.